[tedks]

...it's racist no matter what. It has a connotation (even if it's unintentional which I entirely doubt) of racism, and the overt message (our unifed in-group needs to expel members of this out-group from our space) is racist.

I literally do not see how you could look at this and not see racism. Is your concept of racism limited to overt statements of the form "People whose skin colours are different from mine are bad"?

[dashdot]

Expelling criminals (which was the topic of the referendum) is racist?

I always asked myself how one can misinterpret such a widely used metaphor (except intentionally).

[notahacker]

Because when their posters aren't urging people to say no to black sheep, they're asking them to say no to... people that have brown skin?

http://vincentarsenault.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/suisse-u... http://voixdexils.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/udc_ok2.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-44n7Zc5xJdM/TigsGejS9LI/AAAAAAAAAH...

In fairness to the UDP, they do also appear to have a poster design involving nice, happy, multi-racial Swiss people holding hands, but I bet the ones involving saying NON to scary dark foreign things (and there are a lot of designs that fit this pattern which don't involve sheep metaphors) appear on more billboards.

When even the Daily Mail - the most-widely read source of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK - observes that your campaigns look like they might be jumping on popular racist sentiment, they probably are http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480493/Proposed-Swis...